Rats, Bats & Vats by Dave Freer and Eric Flint

 I think that Freer couldn't quite make up his mind what he was trying to write with Rats, Bats & Vats. It tries to be a serious war novel like The Forever War or Old Man's War, but reads like Bill, the Galactic Hero, more of a satirical work, as we tunnel and trudge through the battles against the alien M'agh with Sergeant Chip Connolly and his squad of seriously deranged genetically engineered rats and bats.

Unfortunately, the humor wasn't enough to save it, and the warfare wasn't intense enough to keep my attention. Gave it up about a quarter of the way through.

Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber and Eric Flint

The multi-POV just got even worse...or better, if you like that sort of thing. It just came to me that this book actually serves in a triad of books with A Rising Thunder and Shadow of Freedom as a multi-novel semi-simultaneously multi-POV telling of the tale Weber started, and which madness other worthies like Flint have bought into. Cachat and Zilwicki finally deliver their news back to the PRH and Manticore, and almost immediately take off on another hare-brained adventure to gather more intelligence on Mesa, managing to sucker a few other fools into their scheme, as well, including Thandi Palani, head of Torch's military.

Queen Berry and her friends decide to form the Royal Torch Navy, mostly consisting of commando-like teams whose first assignments are to be attacking the Mesan slave trade wherever they find it, and they are improbably allied with a family of vagabond space traders we encountered in SoF. Eloise Pritchard and Queen Elizabeth of Manticore meet and decide to bury the hatchet and to ally against the Mesan Alignment. The Sollies still haven't a clue and are basically waiting to get their butts handed to them when the inevitable war comes.

After bouncing around like crazy, though, the story finally settles in on the Mesan thread, and we get to enjoy watching Victor and Anton stirring things up in the seccie underworld there. At first it appears that Victor is going to become a crime boss, but he seizes the opportunity to ally with a powerful one, instead, to prepare the underclass for the battle which is to come.

Operation Houdini is in full swing, and the Alignment kills multiple birds with many stones when they stage a series of "Audubon Ballroom" attacks on civilian targets, both to stir up a massive distraction and retaliation against the seccies who are implicated in aiding the terrorists, and to cover up the disappearance of the members of the Alignment who have been hiding in plain sight in Mesan society. They're headed for a bolthole somewhere, and it should be entertaining to see the deadly duo of Cachat and Zilwicki ferret them out in a later book.

I really need to find a good plot diagram of this whole saga somewhere. It remains confusing to me, even as I enjoy the quality of the storytelling and plot twists.

Boundary, by Eric Flint and Ryk E. Spoor

I'm not entirely certain that I can do much better with this review than the book blurb does. Gotta find out how to become a professional blurbist. Flint's been around a while, but Spoor is new to me.

This was merely some competent entertainment, basically. The story starts when an archaeologist finds some anomalous fossils in the KT boundary. A group of raptors appears to have been killed by an alien from outer space, and somehow their remains were preserved in the fossil record. Of course, the archaeologist in question, Helen Sutter, is subjected to ridicule for even suggesting that aliens might have visited Earth in the distant past, but her career survives despite it all.

Later on in the story, though, an exploratory mission to Phobos, one of Mars' moons, discovers a long abandoned alien base. In the alien base...you guessed it! The scientists find mummified remains exactly like the fossil remains discovered by Dr. Sutter. The excitement created by this discovery motivates the U S government to put together a massive manned expedition to Phobos to exploit any alien technology to be found there.

The whole story reminds me a bit of some early Heinlein, like Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Rocket Ship Galileo, Podkayne of Mars, and so forth. Nothing terribly earthshaking, in this day and age, but enough to provide a few hours of amusement. There is, however, some interesting high tech wizardry with nano-swarm imaging and nuclear space drives.